One of the state’s most popular tourist destinations, Estes Park, was named after a man who brought five slaves to what became Colorado during the Gold Rush in 1859.
During the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan wielded power in state politics, the homes of Black families who began settling around Denver’s City Park were bombed.
And Fruita, world-renowned for its mountain biking, was once a “sundown town” that banned Black people from staying there after dark. It also barred them from being buried in its cemetery until 1952, when a Black family’s tragedy moved lawmakers to change that.
The events are part of the state’s troubled past being uncovered by a three-year legislative-sponsored study that aims to quantify how the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in Colorado contributed to inequities in housing, economic mobility, education, healthcare and criminal justice. Researchers at History Colorado have been working for more than two years on the project, which was created by a 2024 law and funded by more than $1 million in donations from individuals and private organizations.
The findings are being forwarded to the Black Coloradan Racial Equity Study Commission, which was created to oversee the study.
As researchers head into the final weeks of the project, commission members are trying to raise about $300,000 that will pay for economists to analyze the study’s findings and determine the impact racism has had on the state’s population and economy. The commission will make recommendations based on the findings and analysis and submit a report to the legislature and the governor by August 2027.
Those recommendations could include ways to redress past wrongs, but the law doesn’t mention financial reparations as a goal. It just says that any recommendations must be “consistent with the constitution.”
A spokesperson for Senate President James Coleman, who is leading the commission, said any recommendations would be based on the findings of the historical research and economic analysis.
“Until that work is complete, we cannot comment on what those recommendations may be,” spokesperson Ellie Lapp said.
But the effort alone is the first time the state government has looked to unearth, document, categorize and classify racist actions and policies that plagued cities and towns across Colorado. While some stories are better known, others are at risk of being lost in fading memories or lost records. Some have even taken members of the commission by surprise.
So far, Colorado History researchers have identified nine leading Colorado politicians who personally owned slaves as well as dozens of others who were raised in slaveholding families. The study has also found the state government was complicit in allowing lynching of Black Coloradans to occur and go unpunished.
Researchers are still looking into the number of lynchings and public executions of Black people. Program director Chloé Duplessis declined to provide an estimate.
Fruita rallies around Black family
Joel Estes and his family moved from Missouri to Colorado in 1859 before it was a state. He settled first in the Auraria gold mining camp in what is now Denver, according to a History Colorado account. He lived in several places before settling in what became known as Estes Park in 1860.
Whether or not Estes owned slaves has been debated for years, but, within a month of starting the study, History Colorado researchers confirmed that he did, Duplessis said.
Researchers found a letter from Estes’ grandson, Harry Ruffner, saying that Estes had brought five slaves who were “very near to the family” to Colorado and that they were a “curiosity to the Indians of Colorado.”
The Denver house bombings were far from secret. They were front-page news 105 years ago. The Rocky Mountain News described the 1921 bombing as part of a “racial war.”
The target was a Black family, the Starrs, who had moved in near City Park after another Black family moved out following a previous bombing. The bomb tore holes in the home’s walls and shattered windows along the block. Charles Starr, his wife and 10-year-old daughter were not injured. Starr went outside and began firing a rifle into the street, according to an essay by History Colorado historian Scott Spillman.
The perpetrators were never caught, and the Starrs soon sold the house and moved.
Had the house stayed in the Starr family, it would have given them an asset worth about $900,000 today, Spillman wrote.
At the time of the bombings, Colorado had the second-highest number of Klan members in the country. People who wanted to keep Black people out of neighborhoods near City Park eventually turned to less violent methods — using zoning laws and restrictive covenants to block Black people from moving into areas until after World War II, the study’s researchers found.
Fruita made changes after a pickup truck carrying the Minter family from Alabama to Washington state in 1952 crashed nearby, killing Margaret Minter, 14, and seriously injuring her mother. After residents rallied around the family during Mertie Minter’s recovery, offering them a free place to live, meals and help at home, the city made an exception to its sundown rules to allow the family to stay in the city. It was a story that was covered by Colorado newspapers but also made national news, with coverage in Jet and Time magazines, according to local historians Steve and Denise Hight.
In 1952, Fruita repealed a law barring Black people from being buried in its cemetery so Margaret Minter could be buried there. Community leaders served as pallbearers, the Hights wrote.
But while that law was changed, newspaper accounts about the Minters don’t specifically mention the city’s sundown law being repealed then. Researchers have not found a written ordinance, and there’s anecdotal evidence Black people were still required to leave the city at night even into the 1960s, said Melissa Jones, another History Colorado historian.
Margaret Minter was not the first Black person to be buried in Fruita’s cemetery. In 1937, the city made an exception to its burial ban and allowed a beloved Black cowboy Charlie Glass, who worked at the Lazy Y Ranch near Fruita, to be interred in the ranching family’s plot in the cemetery after his suspicious death.
In 1921, Glass shot and killed a shepherd whose flock had been encroaching on the ranch at the time of the “Sheep Wars,” when cattle ranchers and shepherds were at odds over grazing rights. Glass was tried but acquitted in the shooting. He was found dead with a broken neck in 1937 after a night of drinking and playing poker with the shepherd’s cousins. Some believed his death was an act of revenge.
Coleman studied Black history as a child at Union Baptist Excel Institute and his Capitol office has a photo gallery of prominent Black Coloradans, including a large poster of Hattie McDaniel, the first Black actor to win an Oscar. But even he didn’t know about Fruita’s sundown history until it was discussed at the racial equity study commission meeting last week.
Last year, Coleman, a Colorado native and the second Black senate president in state history, visited Fruita with Sen. Janice Rich as part of his effort to travel to every state Senate district. No one mentioned anything about the old restrictions, which he noted were still in place when his mother and father were born.
He said it gives him a broader understanding of cities and towns like Fruita and Estes Park.
“It makes me look at the state differently as I travel through it. Not that I feel negative about it, but I have a deeper appreciation for how far we’ve come,” Coleman said.
He hopes the study demonstrates the need to earmark some state contracts for minority-owned businesses. Previous efforts to do that have been overturned in court because the state didn’t have evidence of racial discrimination, he said.
Unnerving and uplifting
But the stories compiled by the researchers are not all tragic. There are also many that show the resilience of Black people to make a way for themselves, Duplessis said.
When families couldn’t borrow money to buy property on their own, some churches would co-sign their loans, she said.
The first Black woman licensed to practice medicine in Colorado, Dr. Justina Ford, was barred from working in hospitals. She set up a clinic in her home and made house calls, delivering around 7,000 babies, said Shaun Boyd, curator of archives and politics and government at History Colorado. Ford had an open door policy, helping anyone turned away from hospitals, including immigrants and poor white people.
Black people from Colorado and nearby states enjoyed an oasis from discrimination in the outdoors at Lincoln Hills, less than 40 miles from Denver, the only resort for Black people west of the Mississippi. Visitors did have to pass through sundown towns to get there, though, Duplessis said.
“It has been equal parts unnerving and uplifting, this work,” she said.